Rank: ? (3)
Member #: 24712

Hello peoples.

We're planning a big overhaul for our portal and wondered what we could do to clean up a lot of the debris in the db from the past year or two.

After combing through a lot of forum sites ( including this one ) I'm beginning to wonder if the post view count on topics is really necessary ( among a few other things ).
I can understand how some people will tend to post on topics with the most views, but I believe many more people will post if the topic is worth a contribution. Not just popularity.

I'm helping to write a discussion board that may have well have a thousand posts per month ( it's at 485,000 posts currently and we're planning to port it over to the new engine ). This is our chance to strip out things that could slow down the site during heavy traffic.

I'm also looking at the post count for each and every user. My feeling is that this number will make people post even more to get the count up. ( An issue we had before at FxZone, a board that I was a member of a while back : Now defunct ).

So what could be the bare essentials on a forum?

The list I have so far :
- User registration ( Obviously. We've also been thinking of a setup similar to this site )
- Posted Author / Edited Author
- Forum total topic count ( Been having second thoughts on this one too )
- Topic reply count ( Thinking of substituting this with a relative popularity icon )
- Reply quotation / Code formatting
- Email notification of a new post on a topic
- Topic / Forum subscription ( Some dev questions may need immediate reply )
- Moderation / Admin functions ( Edit, move delete etc... )
- Profiles ( Thinking of merging this into the general profiles for the entire site )
- Forum Grouping
- Bad word filter / Bad username filter
- And lastly personal messages

We're doing the code in VB.NET and will use an XML schema to nest Groups, forums, topics and posts.
It may be important to note, we plan on replacing the existing article comment system with the forum engine, by having all the article comments localized on a forum with each topic a collection of comments per article.

Also... We DON'T want to become the next CodeProject forums.
It's absolutely MASSIVE, but very cold, detatched and sometimes confusing. We think making the forums have a small, simple and cozy appearence will help out even though it is quite big. It will also make multiple, large hits to the db unncecessary.
I looked into the setup of Track7 forums including the tables for the database as well as overall layout ( Thanks misterhaan! ) and I think this is a really good direction.

Any suggestions will be appreciated. Don't hold back

Thanks!

Rank: ? (4540)
Member #: 51

sorry we couldn't help ...